


Moth and Web

by aboxthecolourofheartache



Series: Machineries in Fire [2]
Category: Machineries of Empire Series - Yoon Ha Lee, 琅琊榜 | Nirvana in Fire (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Gen, Isolation, Kujen is a content warning in and of himself, Sensory Deprivation, but don't worry he doesn't make an appearance, he's just referenced, indirect spoilers for Revenant Gun, shameless tinkering with the concept of variable signifiers, space horticulture, there is no universe in which Lin Chen is not a plant nerd, there is no universe in which Lin Shu is not a Mess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-23
Updated: 2018-06-23
Packaged: 2019-05-27 11:11:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15023312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aboxthecolourofheartache/pseuds/aboxthecolourofheartache
Summary: Mei Changsu's existence as a revenant tests his limits.  Lin Chen waxes poetic about the fall of the Liozh.  Langya Outpost undoubtedly has gardens, and you can't convince me otherwise.





	Moth and Web

**Author's Note:**

> This is a (less-than-adherent) response to [vass](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vass)'s request for more MoE/NiF fusion. Thank you for giving me the push to kick my writer's block!

Isolation pushes even the strongest to the brink. Mei Changsu’s voice circles the vase of flowers, around and around. Lin Chen finds it difficult to turn his back on the vase even though he knows, with absolute certainty, that Changsu is no threat to him as a ghost. The Shuos in him wants more eyes on Changsu.

“You said you propagate them yourself?” Changsu asks. His voice has not strayed more than half a meter from the chrysanthemums in the past hour.

Lin Chen’s shoulder blades prickle. “I do,” he answers. The flowers are spectacular. Yellow melts into green so pale it all but vanishes against a white background. Sunset reds nest between saffron oranges and purples from the edge of blue to the cusp of red. Lin Chen brought them as a present for Mei Changsu, whose voice scrapes raw when he talks about colors. Grid-projected flowers are colorful, but Lin Chen firmly believes only a real flower knows color best. Perhaps they are too much for someone fresh from three weeks shut into the Black Cradle.

Lin Shu’s self control flutters loose at the edges like a flag too long in high winds. Successfully and safely modifying Mei Changsu’s new signifiers will take longer than Lin Chen expected, because he has to account for their combined effect on Lin Shu’s core ethics. He and Lin Shu agree to protect those ethics at all costs, even if it makes Mei Changsu’s overall presentation more unstable. The interactions of the three signifiers together is making for an alarming tendency towards self-loathing, which, mixed with Lin Shu’s recent latent traumas, promises disaster. They are supposed to be talking about alternatives, but Mei Changsu cannot make himself leave the flowers.

“What do they smell like?”

The readouts under Lin Chen’s fingers display the coefficients of Lin Shu’s soul, if there is such a thing. Lin Chen winces away from the heart-breaking spike in equations of longing when Changsu speaks, guiltily grateful that the revenant’s attention is fixed elsewhere. Even a dead Liozh can still spin a web. The Liozh Mirrorweb represented interconnection and meditative self reflection. Lin Chen takes a self-deprecating moment to reflect that he, a Nirai with a Shuos variant, should have known better than to invite a web into his home and expect not to be caught up.

(Wishful thinking suggests Kujen drew the same conclusion and decided to rid the universe of spiders spinning webs of inconvenient conscience across space like cheesewire strung up for unwary psychopaths. Moth meet web. Perhaps he did not care to be sliced to the quick by a sense he deliberately cut out of himself. In reality, the hanging curtains of Liozh influence likely offended his sense of mathematical aesthetics, so he dusted them out of the rafters with a rail gun.)

“...Lin Chen?” Mei Changsu’s voice halfway between Lin Chen and the flowers. He is shredding himself between his starving need for human interaction after the isolation and sensory stimulation after complete deprivation.

Lin Chen stands and sets down his grid tablet. In return for complete trust, the bare minimum he can give Mei Changsu in return is his complete and undivided attention. Changsu is a disembodied presence, but he is still a person, more than the numbers on a screen, however entrancing they might be. Thinking of people as numbers to manipulate in one’s favor is the knife edge of a precipice. (Mei Changsu is not the only one with a core of ethics to protect.) The Nirai boosts himself up to sit next to the vase on the table and touches the flowers.

“They smell like pollen and spice and earth and rot,” says Lin Chen. “The red ones are a sweeter spice. For some reason the yellows always end up smelling like surgical soap. No matter what I do to breed it out of them - surgical soap. The purples are modified from a perfume variety I cadged off an Andan who owed me a favor. It took fifteen generations to make them smell like chrysanthemums again and not vanilla….”

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Machineries in Fire by aboxthecolourofheartache [podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17192180) by [Rhea314 (Rhea)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhea/pseuds/Rhea314)




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